


Serene, Tender, Melancholic

by NinaMadou



Category: Ancient History RPF, Ancient Roman Religion & Lore, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: 2nd century AD, Adulthood, Aesthetic Philosophy, Aestheticism, Ancient History, Ancient Rome, Brief Mention of Mutilation, Coming of Age, Death, Ethics, Existential Crisis, Great Love, Greco-Roman World, Greek classics, Grief/Mourning, Historical Figures, Historical Romance, Historical speculation, Homosexuality, Immortality, Imperial Favourite, Imperial Rome, Love, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Misguided Love, Mystery Religions, Nerva-Antonine Dynasty, Nina Madou writes, Old Age, Past Character Death, Past Underage, Philosophizing, Philosophy, Poetry, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Reference to Pederasty, Regret, Religion, Roman Art, Roman Emperor, Roman Pantheon, Roman Polytheism, Romance, Romanticism, Rome - Freeform, Sacrifice, Self-Sacrifice, Social Disapproval, Solitude, Tragedy, Tragic Romance, crisis of self, deification, late antiquity, love beyond death, romantic, spirituality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23080786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NinaMadou/pseuds/NinaMadou
Summary: A water drop falls on the words, the ink smearing ever so little. The emperor does not need to touch his cheek, grey-bearded and roughened with age, to know it is a tear for more come running, making the poem blur in front of his tired, burning eyes, conjuring through the blur a face, inutterably beautiful, serene, tender, melancholic. Forever young.
Relationships: Antinous/Publius Aelius Hadrianus | Emperor Hadrian
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	Serene, Tender, Melancholic

**Serene, Tender, Melancholic**

It is hours past sundown this late spring night, and the cool breeze blowing in the gardens floods the room with the vivid perfumes of orange and lemon blossoms. Muted sounds of night life thrum in the deep quiet of the gardens, and the promise of life, new life after the late winter colds, pulses in the warm and fragant dark.

  
In his study, the emperor is tired. Other than the silvery moonlight that bathes the room in shimmering shadows, the only light is the bronze candelabra that illuminates the scrolls and manuscripts that litter his desk. His back aches after hours of bending over densely-scripted pages and his eyes burn; his eyesight is not what it used to be, and now the lines of Aristophanes of Byzantium's commentaries on Homer are melting together in his vision, an ochre and black swirl out of which random words take momentary form. The emperor sighs and leans back, rubs his eyes. He is not young anymore.

  
Work these days is taxing, a million things to occupy his every waking hour. He would be thankful for it, he really would, but that leaves the late night the only time he can devote to his favourite pastime of reading, and he is not ready to give his Greek classics up for the world. It is the only thing he has left now that can bring him happiness. This last war was a harsh and bitter disappointment, its waste marring a dream of years for an empire of people and cultures united in an age of new Classical magnificence. The happy days of Greece, the homeland of his soul, with the long walks in the Athenian Agora and the joys of planning the new epoch of glory with the brightest minds of Attica are far behind him now. And Egypt....he can't even think of Egypt, every happy memory from her colossic beauties obscured by the shadow of that open mud-oozing wound, the Nile, that bleeds through her, as it had made him bleed.

  
He rises and stretches his numbed limbs. It's rather late, but not late enough that he should not pay a visit to the empress. Every morning her health is a little worse than the night before and he has not seen her in three days, though he regularly sends his slaves with gifts to inquire as to her health. He does not wish to see her. He cannot find it in him to feel for her pity, though he knows it to be a cruel and unfair thought. The poor woman tried her best all their marriage to approach him, become close to him, be a proper wife. It is not her fault that, despite her many virtues (her _roman_ virtues, he bitterly thinks) he failed to discover in her a companion for his restless spirit. She had accepted relatively gracefully at long last this truth (and if she had let her temper and wounded pride get the best of her at times, could he really blame her? He shouldn't have expressed himself so harshly about her time and time again, he thinks for the millionth time, and feels that familiar nagging of guilt in his breast). He knows deep down, has always known he has been unfair to her, and that's why he tried to compensate by flooding her with imperial honors, commissioning her face, her beautiful, it's true, face to decorate the empire as goddess, and idea, and her own self. He took her with him in most of his journeys. He had always planned to deify her in the event of her premature death.

  
And now she's dying. He knows they say she dies poisoned by him, and he could scoff. He never desired her death, though once, some time after they had returned from Egypt (two, whereas they had been three when they had left), when she tried to console him, to, somewhat severely it's true, make him snap out of the melancholic mood that he wore like a numbing cloak ever since that fateful dawn in the Nile, he had glared at her, not bothering to hide his anger, and his pain, and his disgust. And he knew, because he saw it, that she read it in his gaze as clear as if he had shouted it, and her eyes grew wide and filled first with surprise, then with fear, and then with hurt, boundless hurt, and she left the room in haste, and ever since then she has always had a stiffness in her shoulders whenever they are together, their already formal relationship turned almost ritualistically cold, for he knows she is always thinking of the time that he had all but shouted to her that he _wished it had been her._

  
Another rumour that floats about is that the empress is dying of a broken heart. That, he can almost believe sometimes.

  
The emperor walks to the window and gazes at the dark gardens, the pale silhouettes of the statues haunting the night, the cistern reflecting the starlit infinity of the sky. A breath of cool air glides across his face, like a caress from an invisible hand. The fragance of the blooming trees is overwhelmingly lovely, and the ichors of the new spring flow strong through the air, promising the birth of new life and the rebirth of the old. But the emperor now knows well that no matter how beautiful it sounds in the mouth of his beloved philosophers, death is final, and never what dies comes back again the same as before and thus does not come back at all, and rebirth a pretty illusion people feed themselves to hide the horror of that finality.  
His forehead on the cool marble of the sill, he wonders how he ended up like this. He did not imagine himself cruel when he was younger, nor grown complacent with grief. He wanted to live according to the high ideals of the Athenians, to carve a golden path through the world like Alexander, be virtuous and self-possessed and dignified like the old Romans of the Republic. For all his efforts, he has failed. This last war is the evidence. His behaviour to his wife is the evidence. The death of his beloved, that too is the evidence.

  
His thoughts fall into this familiar path as naturally as breathing, though he already senses it will lead once again to the same unimaginable pain which he is now condemned to always find himself before.

  
He remembers his boy, fresh-faced and and nimble, waking him and assisting him with his morning grooming, despite his protests that he was not a slave, and should avail himself to the luxuries offered to him instead of behaving like one. "If I were a slave I would just lie back every morning and let myself be pampered till the next night," always replied the youth in the trilling accent of his homeland that he never managed to totally shed. "You take such good care of me, I want to care for you in whatever way I can. I truly want to, Augustus". He always called him that, unless they were alone. Sometimes even then, but his tone then was changed into something pulsing with what far exceeded the respect normally expressed through the title, more akin to adoration, to filial awe.

  
He never paid all that much heed to what he took to be childish capriches, though he always was proudest of the youth's cleverness and eloquence, as he was of his curiosity and will to learn. In their long solitary hours he talked to him endlessly about the world he had seen, about Hispania and Gallia, Britannia and Judaea. He talked to him about his childhood in Italica, his days as a soldier, fighting the Sarmatians and the Parthians, his life in Athens, about men he had known and spoken to and fought side by side with that now were dead or far away, in distant provinces (he didn't speak about the hardships of securing power, of the intrigues and of those that he had had to get rid off. He disliked dwelling on those memories). He enthusiastically initiated the boy in the luminescent glory of the Greek classics, reading and explaining to him Herodotus and Xenophon, Aeschylus and Apollonius. He had teachers, the best that could be found, for the youth's education, yet the young student declared that not even the greatest teacher in the _imperium_ could rival the passion with which the emperor talked about Callimachus and Homer and Arrian, and that pleased the emperor so much that he ordered a golden wreath in the shape of olive branches, with amethyst fruit that would shine sensuously among the youth's dark curls, and gave it to him along with a poem written just for him, exhalting the beauty of his body and his mind. His boy had smiled at that, more at the poem than at the gift, though he wore it that night and the many nights that followed.

  
He was clever, his mind untamable as flame, jumping from one thing to another, exhibiting a rare quickness of understanding and wit. He soon reached a level of expertise that allowed him to study the classics alone, and often in the afternoons he would read aloud his favourite parts and they would comment together. He especially liked drama; he used to read in different voices the texts of Euripides, which especially fascinated him, taking on pompous, delicate or dramatic airs depending on the role speaking, and the emperor couldn't help laughing at this affectionate irreverence. "My boy" he would call him when he was well pleased with him, or "dear child" when there were others present, but at these times when they were all alone and happy and careless, he would call him "beloved", and the youth would respond only "my only one". He never asked him how he meant, thinking it was obvious. Now, when all this was lost and gone, he had discovered he was not so sure.

  
The emperor sighs and returns to his seat. He absent-mindedly caresses his abandoned scrolls and then, almost instinctually, pulls out of the heap a little roll much touched and used, rolls it open and his finger finds the words he's seeking with the easiness that comes from having read them countless times.

_For my part, I have made you wings on which to fly_  
_across the endless sea and all the earth_  
_with ease, you’ll soon be at every dinner, every feast,_  
_and many a man will have you on his lips,_  
_and lovely lads accompanied by alto pipes_  
_will sing of you in voices sweet and clear_  
_and orderly._

A water drop falls on the words, the ink smearing ever so little. The emperor does not need to touch his cheek, grey-bearded and roughened with age, to know it is a tear for more come running, making the poem blur in front of his tired, burning eyes, conjuring through the blur a face, inutterably beautiful, serene, tender, melancholic. Forever young.

  
Forever young.

  
The emperor closes his eyes and lets his head fall to his chest. His boy will remain forever that; a boy. And yet, something more, too. He has done right by his beauty and by the love they shared. Generations and generations will sing the praise of his loveliness, for he made sure to trap it in eternity, like a rare insect in amber. He commissioned his likeness in stone, in porphyry and granite and the whitest, milkiest marble, sanded smooth so as to mimic the softness of his sun-kissed skin. He set him up everywhere across the vast _imperium_ , in forums and palaces, in porches and thermae. He adorned him with the symbols of Osiris and Apollo and Dionysus, and made him a god.

  
Yes, he has created for his dearest a legacy to rival those of the heroes of Greece. But what will the world know of him other than his loveliness and the love he inspired to the emperor of Rome?

  
They won't know of his laughter, clear and crystalline as an Arcadian spring. They will never guess that for all his love of poetry he refused categorically to write it, and yet took immense pride in even the emperor's most mediocre attempts at it, as though they were verses of Simonides or Virgil. The world will be unable to imagine that for years he sometimes woke at night crying for his home, and neither the most tender words nor the most generous promises could calm him, until the older man held him tightly to his chest and whispered in his ear that he would never leave him, never throw him aside. Why would they care that he sometimes disguised himself and went out in the streets, to steal fruit and run and play at war with other youths his age, coming back with cheeks red as apples and so alive a smile that it cut short even the most concerned scolding? That the emperor sometimes caught him looking at him when he was working or sleeping or gazing away distractedly with a molten gaze filled with things too vast to be expressed in words or even touches? That this sweet-faced youth, feeling oppressed by his confining scholarly education after years in the freedom of his provincial home, loved hunting as much as he, so that, in that last fatal journey, in Libya, he ran alone after a wild lion and would have gotten himself killed if the royal party hadn't arrived on time?

  
A vein throbs in the emperor's temple at that memory. Even now, that all that has proven to be in vain and the worst has already happened, he can't shake off the coldness of fear that had frozen his blood that thrice-cursed day.

He berated the youth in front of everyone for his flippancy, the dark eyes of the young hunter on his the whole time, his face an unmoving mask of calm. And when they were returning to their accomodations and, the first rage of worry having passed, the emperor signaled the youth to ride up next to him, he approached, and reaching over to lean his head very close to the emperor's he murmured for his ear only " One who is now a grown man cannot longer be scolded like an unruly child", and, bowing his head respectfully, he returned to his place farther back. And the emperor felt something catch in his throat, for he recognized his own words from a few weeks back, when he refused the young man's usual displays of affection when they were spending a quiet evening in their rooms, surrounded only by slaves and flute-players. For it was true, his boy was now grown, almost twenty years of age, for all the world a man, and while it may have been unremarkable for an emperor to enjoy the favours of a blossoming youth, affection for a man grown, so unapologetically obvious at least, was largely frowned upon, particularly if one was emperor of Rome and did not wish to invite distasteful and potentially dangerous comparisons to predecessors like Nero and Caligula.

  
He sometimes found himself wishing that his beloved did not have to grow at all. He was not afraid of his beauty fading, not really (he only seemed to get more radiant every day, as the start of maturity sculpted his face slowly but surely into delicate manliness, his body into the picture of health and graceful vigor). Only he had long lost that lightness of gait, that endearing amazement with which he contemplated the new vast world he had found himself into. His carriage was now that of a man, steady, assured, lively. It was rarer presently that he expressed curiosity as before, his education having borne brilliant fruits of intellect and knowledge. There were now subjects on which the older man was the less informed of the two, though the youth always exhibited respect and decorum when they conversed together. There were hardly things to teach him now that he had not been taught already, and that brought a comradeship that was not there before, and yet ever so slightly changed the ambience of their hours together in a way that held some inherent uneasiness. He was more self-confident now even in their intimacy, wanting, sampling, taking initiative, even as his own desires cooled with age and tiredness. He could swear he had caught him at times resting his eye a moment too long on some pretty slave girl or passing young woman on the street, an instinctual wonder in his eye, though he never had the least cause to doubt his devotion. All that, along with occasional low whispers and respectfully disapproving stares when they became a tad too free with each other in the presence of others, put a distance between them, imperceptible but deep, that for the first time made tangible the underground but vast rift between emperor and commonborn attendant which till now the labors of Eros and Aphrodite had attempted to bridge.

  
That incident of the lion hunt was only the culmination of this weird resentment they both felt without being able put it to words or reconcile it with their unwavering feelings for each other. Soon after that, in Egypt, the emperor fell ill, and at his age, surrounded by the humid egyptian heat, the thought of death crossed his mind in bleak seriousness, though his doctors assured him that it was nothing so grave.

  
Yet he, knowing his body that had kept steadily deteriorating through the years, and not wanting to risk the chance of dying without speaking to his beloved, commanded they all leave his room, keeping only him close. He had not stopped tending to him all this time, and his dark eyes sparkled liquidly with unsaid things. The emperor lost himself in those eyes, and in his silence the truth sounded clearer than he could ever have articulated with all his learning and erudition. He finally raised his hand to caress his dark hair, but the young man only took it in his own two, brought it to his lips and covered it with kisses, whispering words of no sound but which vibrated through his skin and blood directly to his heart, and brought tears - so like these ones now! - to his fever-burning eyes. And his dearly beloved looked at him the way he used to, full of devotion and affection, awe and adoration, only now there was a serene tenderness he had not seen before, a slight melancholic curve in the corner of his petal-like lips, and he leaned and kissed the emperor's deeply lined forehead like he was the father and the older man the son. Then he rose and walked to the door. He stopped for a moment, turning his head and casting a last dark, molten gaze on the man who was already slowly slipping into dreamless lethargy, and he exited the room.  
The emperor woke feverless, his nightclothes soaked in sweat and his heart light. He called his servants immediately and amidst general rejoicing began to get ready, sending for his boy as soon as he was dressed, wondering at his absence from his side. But the beloved tarried long in coming and, light as a feather for the first time in months, he started to look for him, to affectionately scold him and call him to spend the day together, to celebrate a new beginning in this exotic land of miracles. Having reached the bank of the river through the gardens of their lodgings, he hardly took notice of a small pavilion standing half in the water and littered with the discarded decorations (candles, garlands and empty trays) of some or other ritual feast, when suddenly a woman's scream shattered the cool green luminousness of the dawn and tore his heart to pieces.

  
There had been a cultish celebration of the god Osiris the night before down at the river, it was soon learnt, and though many talked in grief, satisfaction or indifference of an drunken accident, an assassination or a suicide, the emperor never managed to put out of his mind that it was a transaction his dearest beloved had made voluntarily with the chthonic god; his own precious, promising, pulsating young life for the life of the failed and flawed old man that he loved, who may have inadvertedly wished all this to bleak existence when he resented his dear boy for growing up.

  
The secret guilt that continued to eat at his insides all those years prevented him from ever seriously believing the death was the deed of assassins, much less the calumny of drunkenness or ritual castration (how could one stomach the thought of one so young and who so longed to grow into a man worthy of his beloved emperor mutilating himself to return to a parody of childhood for his sake? No it was unworthy of his boy, unworthy of him, too painful and unjust to think about). He had wept so much over the loss that his critics felt justified in expressing reprobation, only for him to pay them no heed and them to fall next into stunned silence, this display of sorrow being something too much out of the ordinary, too uncompromisingly real to know how to deal with it, their disdain and contempt and ridicule evaporating when trying to penetrate his grief, like rain drops trying to douse a forest fire.  
Hunted by the thought of letting his love and his dearest beloved flicker out of this world, he strove manically to cut them into the fabric of remembrance. He ordered that a city be built in the place of his death, bearing the beloved's name, he scoured the night sky till he believed he found a star that shone with something akin to his godlike radiance, he dedicated the nilotic pink lotuses he had so loved when alive to him, commanding them to be used to adorn his monuments and statues, and finally, disregarding the Senate itself, elevated him to the pantheon of immortals, encouraging him to be adored along with the Olympians and the gods of the Phoenicians and Egyptians and Parthians and the emperors of old. Along with him, hopefully, one day, to meet again in the singing spheres of the heavens.

  
And so he had consigned him to the cold marble of eternity, a perfect idol that once upon a time was a beautiful boy who laughed and sang and ran and kissed him, now imprisoned forevermore in the amber of his grief and his unconquerable love, never to grow up or grow old, just like he had once wished it. An Adonis dead and risen no more.

  
The emperor still has his finger on the line of the poem at which he stopped. Out of a perverse need to magnify the already almost unbearable pain, to reach a crescento of suffering akin to that of carnal ecstasy, he continues reading, though he could have recited the whole scroll of poems by heart and not miss a single syllable.

_And when, down in the earth’s dark nooks,_  
_you go to Hades’ house of wailing grief,_  
_not even in death will your fame fade, but men_  
_will always cherish your immortal name,_  
_Cyrnus, as you roam over all the land of Greece,_  
_and all the islands of the teeming sea,_  
_not riding then on horseback; no, the violet wreathed_  
_Muses will speed you by their noble grace._

And it is finally too much. Heart thundering in his chest, he jumps up and runs out of the room, through the silent moonlit halls of the villa, out in the fragant dark. If anyone sees him, he doesn't dare approach him. He crosses the gardens among the silvery shadows of nymphaea and colonnades, the phantom-pale figures of the statues peering from the grottoes and the niches staring unblinking ahead, uncaring that he is an emperor, that he is pain. He heads straight for the shrine he built there for the much-loved dead, the much-loved god. The keeper of the temple grounds is dozing off lying near the portico. He ignores him and enters the familiar small enclosed space, the darkness perfumed with incense and the scent of flowers and untouched by moonlight, broken only by the flickering flame of a small oil lamp hanging in the _adyton_.

  
The emperor approaches slowly. In the darkness of the _adyton_ , the statue of the god rises at man's height on a low pedestal, a dark shape acquiring a semblance of materiality in lightened shadow and coppery glow. In the dark and from across the _naos_ , it could be anyone, but standing in front of it, the emperor recognizes once again in the half-light, under that same gold and amethyst olive-branch wreath he had gifted him so long ago, in happier times, the face of his dearest beloved boy. Only it is not his face. His face was never still, his feelings always passing across and through it like the sunlight in a calm stream, finding refuge in the large mysterious darknesses of his eyes when he finally learned to school his expression in calculated neutrality. The eyes of the statue, though remarkable in their vividness, with deeply graven irises and pupils, are lifeless. Just one moment, frozen solitarily in time, yet trying to embody a person who was animated from living countless moments like this, sharing most of them with him.

  
The emperor takes the last decisive steps, climbs on the pedestal, comes eye to eye with the sculpture. He studies its face intently, trying to conjure his beloved, to call on him to inhabit this empty stone. It is no use. The face of the statue is not the face his boy wore when he last saw him, because he was not a boy anymore by then. In his eyes there was depth that no child can ever carry within, his tender, melancholic, serene gaze holding all the meanings of love the philosophers and poets talk about, and all those they never speak of. His own love made his boy a man in that moment before he exited his room and the world of the living, and though he did it for him, because of him, through him, in doing that he had necessarily left him behind.

  
And yet here he is now, neither old, nor young, consigned to the starlit eternity of gods, immortalized as a symbol of what he had ceased to be long before he died. His unseeing eyes hold neither adoration nor that one-time tender serenity, only gentle indifference. His lips curve ever so slightly not in the knowing melancholy of goodbye, but in placid sympathy or condescension. He kisses them. They are, of course, cold. Smooth and so very,very cold. And he knows then that, even if they do meet again after his own death, they will never be warm again. That last gaze, brimming with all the deepest and greatest love this world can birth, lives now only in his memory.

  
He would give everything to take back what he once wished. He would suffer the torments of Tartarus to make it all right again. But there are things even an emperor of Rome is unable to do.

  
His beloved belongs to the gods now; young and not-young, he is forever out of his grasp.

  
The world will never know him as he was alive. Even he, he hardly knew him until it was too late.

_Future men likewise, all who have an interest,_  
_will sing of you, while earth and sun exist._

  
In the fragant dark of the night garden, a lament rises from inside the dark shrine, echoes through the columns and the trees, shatters the quiet darkness under the starlit sky. The old keeper half-awakes startled, listens carefully for a while, makes a half-hearted gesture to ward off evil and goes back to sleep, neither daring nor caring to interfere. It's not a rare occurrence, after all, the emperor weeping before the statue of the god. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Hadrian had a famously cold relationship with his wife, Vibia Sabina, though to the extent of their hostility for each other none can agree. It is mentioned in "Historia Augusta" that he had expressed wish to divorce her and only held back because of dynastic and political reasons (no written down evidence of Hadrian's attraction to women and particularly his wife exists, in constrast to his known interest for men; Sabina remained childless and the distance between them is popularly attributed to his homosexuality).On the other hand, Sabina often traveled with him, as few other roman wives and almost no prior empresses had done, and rarely was there an empress so well-represented in art.
> 
> 2\. I kept the most popular chronology, with Antinous as 12-14 years old when he met Hadrian and around 20 when he died. As I said before, we have practically no knowledge as to Antinous' character and personality, though it is accepted that Hadrian at least thought him clever and wise, and it is known they shared a love for hunting (the lion hunt in Libya is a true happening, which Hadrian propagandized heavily, though I imagined the whole context described). 
> 
> 3\. I peppered in, in as correct a chronological sequence as I could discern, as many historically acknowledged facts as the story could take .
> 
> 4\. We have no way of knowing anything about Antinous' real feelings for Hadrian, so I did a lot of conjecture in as much a realistic way as I could imagine. The sure thing is that at the time of Antinous' death, his age would have dictated a change in the relationship between him and Hadrian.
> 
> 5\. We have no way of knowing how exactly Antinous died, nor was Hadrian especially sick during their stay in Egypt (that was pure drama). All of the things mentioned as possibilities are theories put forth by historians (the voluntary castration/circumcision was supposed, according to some popular-mystical-butchery folklore of the age and place to help rejunevation, and it has been proposed in relationship to Antinous growing up and out of the theoretical "age range" of an eromenos, though it doen't hold much water). The theory about voluntary sacrifice to restore Hadrian's ill health is a particularly popular one and one that also would testify for a genuine affection from Antinous' part. Furthermore, you will agree, makes for a great story.
> 
> 6\. The poem is by Greek 6th century B.C. elegic poet Theognis of Megara, who wrote poetry expressing the aristocratic ethos of his time. Most of them take the form of advice to his young lover, Cyrnus. left the last two verses out, but I think the rest perfectly match Hadrian's construction of a posterity for Antinous and their love that reaches us even today. Here is the poem in its original Greek :  
> http://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek/anthology/literature/browse.html?text_id=63
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
